University News Last updated 13 October 2010
Roy McFarlane, a student on the MA in Writing course in the School of English, has been named Birmingham's Poet Laureate for 2010/11.
Roy was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and spent most of his former years living in Wolverhampton. As Resident Poet at Starbucks, a solo performer and a member of the New October Poets he’s performed in numerous venues, sharing the stage with poets such as Roi Kwabena, Fred D’Aguiar and Talking Brothers. His play For the Love of Auset premiered at The Drum, Aston, in June 2007. His short story Conversation with an Ant has also been published in Original Skin. As the new Poet Laureate, Roy's aim is to make poetry fun and accessible to Birmingham’s diverse people, celebrating the vibrancy of performance poetry as well as encouraging the beauty of poetry on the page.
Roy has performed and read in libraries, pubs, cafes, theatres, conferences, art galleries and many other poetry events and venues. He is currently involved in a number of poetry projects, one of them being a poetry anthology called 10 Birmingham Poets (out next year). He hopes that his tenure as Birmingham Poet Laureate will be "fun, dramatic and diverse to include all our communities across Birmingham".
The MA in Writing, in association with the National Academy of Writing, is a two-year, part-time course aimed at emerging writers. The course is run and validated by the School of English at Birmingham City University. This is the only graduate course in the UK supported by the National Academy of Writing and its patrons - an impressive list of established writers who support the Academy's aims and contribute to the programme of lectures, workshops and tutorials.